A message from Andrew Rasiej, Tech President's Publisher

Thank you for visiting techPresident, where politics and technology meet. We’re asking our readers to help support the site. Let us tell you why:

Since 2007, we've expanded techPresident's staff and daily work to exhaustively look at how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. To provide the independent and deeply informed journalism we do, we need to find ways to support this growth that will allow us to keep the majority of our content free.

First POST: Positive Sums

A close analysis of unofficial results from the NYC Board of Elections by DailyKos blogger "brooklynbadboy" finds that Zephyr Teachout won some of the city's wealthiest state assembly districts while Governor Andrew Cuomo won some of its poorest. "This is the inverse of what should happen in a liberal primary challenge," he writes.

Speaking of DailyKos, it's worth noting that the site has been having its best year ever, traffic-wise, according to this recent post by Markos Moulitsas, its founder. In August, it had nearly 8.5 million unique visitors, way more than the 6.8 million the site hit in October 2012. Moulitsas attributes the spike to hot news (Ferguson), a steady rise in mobile traffic, its 1.6 million user email list, and Facebook.

Campaigns are starting to use Facebook's own "Custom managed audiences" tool to find voters they want to target, reports Derek Willis of the New York Times.

James Rucker, the co-founder of Color of Change and the Citizen Engagement Lab, details the long-standing funding of civil rights organizations by big telecom companies, in exchange for telecom-friendly lobbying by those organizations.

Continuing the "what is civic tech" conversation, Tom Steinberg embraces the term "civic tech" and David Karpf argues for a distinction between civic "positive-sum" activity and political "zero-sum" activity.

Crowdfunding site GoFundMe is blocking campaigns to help users pay for abortions, but continuing to allow fundraising for anti-abortion campaigns, reports Katie McDonough for Salon. GoFundMe says it "makes no distinction and places no restrictions on a pro-life or pro-choice groups ability to fundraise for rallies or protests," but it will not allow users to "fund an abortion or to purchase firearms."

"Techies for Climate Justice" are marching together at the September 21 People's Climate March in New York City.